Six and a Half Deadly Sins (15 page)

“Any idea where we might find her?” Civilai asked, still cuddling the large parcel to his chest.

“She used to live in Muang Sing,” said the woman. “No idea if she’s still there. Just ask around. ‘American Mae,’ they call her.”

There are moments that remind a coroner that his or her job is more than merely the slicing and cataloguing of meat. Looking down at the slab into the lifeless eyes of a friend is perhaps the most poignant. As a nurse, Dtui had been trained to help the sick. Her interest in pathology had grown from admiration for Dr. Siri. In fact, from outdated text books and trial and error, they had learned the craft together. Were it not for an unplanned pregnancy, Dtui would have traveled to the Eastern Bloc to learn the skill from experts. And in a country where handling the dead was considered taboo on many levels, she would have become the first coroner of Laos
who actually wanted the job. All she had now was a nursing certificate and a hunger to learn more.

Even so, Judge Haeng, back in his role of Head of Public Prosecution, had ordered her to find the cause of death of a teacher at Vientiane’s most prestigious school. Dtui had called back Mr. Geung from the house of his fiancée. She knew she’d never be able to perform the autopsy alone. That morning, Geung was already on the steps sweeping when she arrived at the morgue. The old welcome mat was back in its place. They hugged and cried for a very long time over the loss of their friend Ou. Geung had set about cleaning the building and had said nothing to Dtui, who sat on a stool beside the slab, holding her friend’s hand.

At last she told him, “Geung, I can’t do it.”

“I … I can show you,” he said.

“No, honey. I know how, I just can’t bring myself to do it.”

“Her d-d-dad said it’s all right,” he reminded her.

“I know. He wants to know what happened. We all do. But … I don’t know. There must be another way. Geung, let’s put Teacher Ou back in the freezer and go for a walk.”

“Okay.”

For a large woman and an uncoordinated man, the
lycée
was a brisk thirty-minute walk from Mahosot, but the weather was pleasant, and there was enough cloud cover to shade them from the midday sun.

The principal was still depressed at the loss of his most experienced science teacher. “But she studied in Australia,” he said, as if that were enough to exempt her from death.

“I know,” Dtui replied.

The principal showed Dtui and Geung to Ou’s small office behind the science lab. There was barely enough space for two, so the principal left them to it. Unvarnished wood shelves crammed with bottles reached high up two walls. The labels were in Russian and German. None was in Lao or English.
There were photographs of Ou’s son, Nali, on the only vacant patch of wall. He would never get to know his mother. Dtui found herself squeezing Geung’s hand.

“Hurts,” said Geung.

“Sorry, pal. So where do we start?”

“At the start,” said Geung.

“All right.”

She felt a sniffle as if her cold might be returning. “Any signs of medication?” she asked. “I suppose she might have taken some wrongly labeled cold medicine. But if she did, how would we know? After this, we can go to her parents’ house and take a look in the bathroom.”

Geung burst out laughing.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Look in the ba—the bathroom.”

It wasn’t easy to tell what might tickle Mr. Geung or why, but he never failed to make Dtui laugh, even on a dour day like this. “Geung, you’re a nutcase.”

“I’m a nut.”

Dtui turned a slow circle and took in the details of the alcove. “All right. So she would have been sitting at her desk. She was a scientist. What was she working on?”

Dtui sat on Ou’s chair and looked around. There was a clunky black Soviet microscope to one side of the work bench. Beside it was a box of slides. Each one was hand labeled with a date. The latest slide contained a single strand of material. The label was marked
COLOR TEST N34
. Dtui knew that color tests were conducted to check for volatile substances. The combinations and the colors they produced were outlined in a book Siri had obtained from Chiang Mai University in Thailand. They had used the tests successfully on stomach contents and identifying pills and powders. Teacher Ou kept methodical notes in a ledger open on the desk. Slide N34 had featured in eleven tests. The teacher’s handwriting had
deteriorated rapidly over the last five pages, and the final page was almost illegible. But Dtui could make out the word
negative
beside each entry.

She opened the color test book. Teacher Ou had worked on the toxins in the same order they appeared in the book. The next toxin due to be tested for was arsenic, but there was no entry for it in the ledger. She sat at Ou’s desk and had pulled up the chair when her left foot kicked something on the floor. It was a book, a thick textbook. She picked it up and read the English title:
Toxicology
.

“What’s it doing on the floor, Geung?” she asked.

“Teacher Ou … d-d-dropped it?”

“I bet she did. So this was what she was last reading.”

Dtui went through the pages. There were no bookmarks or dog-ears. There was nothing highlighted. “But what was she reading? What was it that made her leave in a hurry and drop the book?”

Then she remembered the last word her friend had spoken.

“Paris,” she said. “Something to do with Paris.”

She turned to the index. There were two entries under Paris;
Paris: 1968 Toxicological conference
, and
Paris Green.

She turned to the latter and read aloud in English for Geung to hear but not to understand.

Dtui looked at the green strand in the slide. She understood enough of the article to know what had happened to Teacher Ou. “Oh, Geung. That was it. We didn’t have colds. We were both suffering from arsenic poisoning. But why is it that I got over it, but she didn’t?”

Geung was holding up the slide to the light from the high louver window.

“It … it’s the same color,” he said.

“As what?”

“As the chair cover.”

Dtui scrambled to her feet and looked back at the chair. Geung was right. On the seat back was the half skirt that Siri had left behind for Ou to examine. She was using it as an attractive chair cover. She’d sat at this desk every day between lessons, exposing herself more and more to the poison. It wasn’t flu that had killed Teacher Ou. It was Paris Green. In ten days it had destroyed the system of a healthy young woman. What chance, at their age, would Siri and Daeng have?

It had been a long morning, and Siri and Daeng were feeling the worse for it. Daeng had been right. A good meal and a bath had improved her husband’s mood but not his health. Still they followed the treasure trail of
pha sin
s with no idea where or into what it might lead them. They had spent the morning in search of American Mae, who incorporated gold thread into her skirts. She had worked for the eccentric American doctor, Dooley, in the sixties and still lived nearby, they were told. They found her, as was usual in Laos, by being passed from hut to hut, from person to person, until they were rewarded by an, “Oh, yes. She lives near the old fort. I’ll show you.”

Civilai insisted on staying in the jeep with his highly addictive new friend on his lap while Siri and Daeng walked to the house. They found American Mae sitting on the floor with her family, about to start their midday meal. She was thin, as were her relatives, and she had a curiously wide parting that was starting to look like the pate of a Japanese samurai.
Ignoring apologies and protests of, “Really. We’ve just eaten,” the family insisted the visitors join them for a bite to eat. And a bite was all they seemed to have. Siri and Daeng nibbled sparingly and apologized for their diarrhetic uncle in the jeep who never ate.

After lunch, with the sun still hidden behind a thick mist, Mae led them into her pretty garden where the frangipani and mimosa blooms looked like snow on the bushes. She took them through a gap in the broken fence and along a path that ended at a small cottage. After hearing a highly abridged version of their venture to the north, not including the murder of the weaver or the presence of twenty kilos of heroin in the jeep, Mae had told them about the old guesthouse and insisted they stay there while they continued their quest. She too had a plastic bag for them that had been left by the same plain woman.

“This is where Dr. Tom stayed,” she told them while they settled in. She pointed through the window at a long gray building in need of a coat of paint. “The clinic is just over there. There’s nobody staying here. I keep it clean out of habit, mainly.”

The Lao knew all about the Muang Sing medical team. The old clinic had once been occupied by Dr. Tom Dooley, the American upper-class dandy who had dedicated much of his life to work with the poor—although he never suffered his hardships in silence. He was a master of self-promotion. The building was situated opposite the old French military compound on the road to Ban Khuang. Some had seen Dooley as a saint. Others called him a glory-seeker and a CIA plant. But whatever his motives, a lot of people in the north who would otherwise have died from the absence of medical care had survived. The Chinese had hated him and his team and made daily radio broadcasts to say that they were practicing witchcraft and murdering babies. To have upset the Chinese
so seriously, Civilai considered the Americans to have been doing something right.

The guesthouse had three actual beds with spring bases, a refrigerator and a piano. Civilai hid the stash under his bed and joined the others in the living room. Daeng, coughing heavily now, was laying out the
sin
s on the floor.

Siri opened Mae’s plastic bag and took out the latest. “They’re all Thai Lu,” he said, recognizing the pattern.

“It’s from Muang Xai,” said Mae.

“There it is again.” Daeng laughed. “The weavers’ grapevine. Tell us, Mae. How can you tell where it’s from so precisely?”

“Auntie Duang in Muang Xai has been having trouble with her loom for a couple of years. It’s an ancient monster, impossible to get spare parts for. It’s like a typewriter that has one broken key. A weaver can recognize the effects of a broken loom. Weaving a
pha sin
is like raising a child. You have mishaps. You have moments you’re proud of and others when you know you could have done better if you’d concentrated. By the time you’ve completed a skirt, you can make out all the characteristics and the flaws and the happy moments you’ve been through together. It’s like recognizing your own daughter. You see this loose gathering here?”

“Barely,” said Daeng.

“That’s a result of the comb not beating evenly. The wood of the frame is warped.”

“So we’re looking for Auntie Duang in Muang Xai?” Civilai asked.

“It’s hers for sure,” said Mae. “But if you’re going to see her, I’d better warn you about her.”

“What?”

“She’s a little bit … eccentric. Some of the locals call her Auntie Voodoo.”

“I’ll be sure to make a note of that,” said Civilai, no longer shocked by such a warning.

“I don’t think there’s anything in …” Siri began. He had felt around the hem of the new
sin
but found nothing. So he began to cut away the stitching. “No, wait. There is something.”

He reached in with two fingers and pulled. It was brown tape, the type used in cassette recorders. It was about three feet long. “I don’t suppose your Dr. Tom left a cassette recorder behind, by any chance?” Siri asked.

“You think something’s recorded on it?” Civilai asked.

“Fat lot of use if there isn’t,” said Siri.

Mae explained that some of her neighbors had radios to pick up the Chinese music station, but cassette recorders were far beyond their budgets. So the tape would have to wait. She left them to relax, but none of them could sleep. Instead they sat in the living room, staring at the odd gallery of
sin
s spread out on the floor.

“Five
sin
s, five clues,” said Daeng.

“Technically, four and a half,” Siri reminded her.

“Nice collection though,” said Civilai, who was clearly coming down with the flu too. “Do you suppose they spell out some message if we arrange them right? Some semiotic signal? How’s your naval training, Siri?”

“Once across the Mekhong on a log was as close as I got to the navy,” said Siri. “You know, I think the
sin
s are just the
laissez-passer
s. They get us from one place to the next. I think the locations are important. What we have to do is collect all the clues and work it out from there.”